Family History Sketch- Grandma's Car

Grandma Peggy drove a white VW Bug. I must have ridden in it mostly in the summer because I remember the feeling of that black vinyl on the back of exposed legs between where my shorts ended and the point where I could get my legs away from the seat.

Grandma would take us interesting places in her Bug, such as to visit a cousin we never knew or to see her fabulously stylish friends. Even a trip to the grocery store seemed exotic if we went with Grandma.

The back seat was small, just large enough for me and my sister, Anne Marie, but certainly not for my tall, skinny uncles, John the pony-tailed Harvard grad, and Dave, who probably drove the little car on dates with his girl friend.

The vinyl gave the car a distinctly pungent smell like a hot eraser after I had erased my mistakes in my first grade mathbook. The Bug was often parked in the shade of the sagey, velvety Russian olive tree on the South side of the driveway at my grandparents' house on Laird Way. Not that the shade made any difference to the heat inside the car. Being a marvel of German engineering, the car had its trunk in the front of the car and the engine in the back. Grandpa drove a Buick, which held no appeal over the style and form of the White Bug.

Boy Blue Grows Up

I was thinking today that watching Joseph grow up is sort of like watching a tadpole become a frog.  He is at a stage where he is sometimes a child, and sometimes much more mature than I expect him to be.  It reminds me of the stage where a tadpole still has its tail, but also has its frog legs and everything.  It's a tadpole and a frog at the same time.  

I see Joseph becoming so big, and he is so tender and kindhearted.  He is so bright, and is developing some really great aptitudes in reading, math, and even piano.  He is starting to catch up to my level of knowledge in some ways and I can see a time when he will pass me by in these areas. There are times when I can really see glimpses of the man he will become someday.  Then the next second he wants me to sing him to sleep or take him to Toys R Us. 

Nineteen Years Ago Today

Marty proposed! When I think about it, I can still feel what I felt that day. Now we have officially been together for as long as I existed before we met. Although I can't remember what that felt like. He's too much a part of me now.

Laughter is the best medicine!

This is my handsome husband, Marty. Everyone that knows my husband has probably heard a "Martinism." A Martinism is a word that Marty uses so completely out of context that it shocks a person or makes her laugh. It is fairly ironic that we ended up together because as student of the English language, I am acutely aware of grammar and usage, so I really never miss a chance to point one out. Marty is self-conscious about his Martinisms, but I find it one of his most charming qualities (after being a good kisser of course).

An example of a Martinism occured when we were both in college. His fraternity had a department-store mannequin that was dressed terribly inappropriately. My sorority friends felt sorry for the poor waif, so we kidnapped the mannequin (Lola was her name) and gave her a decent outfit, leaving a notification that we had rescued her from their neglectful care. The boys decided to get revenge and attempt to recover Lola by absconding with our president's gavel, which we used at our chapter meetings. Except the ransom note read, "We have taken your ANVIL."

I think if you want to get a response to your ransom note, you really need to properly reflect the nature of your demands.

So yesterday we were visiting a sick lady in the hospital so Marty could help to give her a priesthood blessing. My dear, sweet husband even dressed up in a suit and tie, which he normally reserves for speaking in church or for funerals (only if you were really close). Marty ever so tenderly asked this lady if she had scheduled her autopsy (he meant biopsy).

Of course when we all started laughing our heads off, he turned tomato red and almost died of embarrassment. It may be a little mean of me to post about it here on my blog, but this is a story that needs to be shared, preserved for the generations, and cherished forever.

Love you honey.

A Birthday Girl

Cricket
Originally uploaded by FishChick

She turned eight this week. It's a little hard for me to accept. We had a totally dreamy birthday party at The Lion House, the home that Brigham Young built in downtown Salt Lake City. It was really as perfect as could be. The girls were darling, the hostess was so great, and Grammy and I got to feel like we were eight again too. At eight, Caroline loves dolls, dancing, and art. She is a super reader, and has lots of friends. Her idea of a great day is going out to lunch and having a pedicure and going shopping. A little precocious, yes, but still wonderfully naive, imaginative, and sweet too.

The Lord's Mysterious Ways

First of all I want to say that it is really uncomfortable to me to share some of these things on my blog, but I feel inspired to do so. The reason for the discomfort is not so much that I don't want to share my thoughts, but perhaps a little worry about what others might think of them, and experience with getting completely flamed on the web for having the audacity to have statements influenced by religious beliefs enter the public discourse.

Inspiration and Revelation

I just love the way the Lord hands out inspiration in little bits here and there. Over the past several weeks I have had so many wonderful things occur to me and they are all seeming to be on a related theme. Right now I'm not really sure where they are leading me, but I am curious and enjoying the journey. My theory is that one function of the Holy Ghost on the mortal is to build a literally more spiritual brain through constant exercise of the neural pathways related to spiritual thinking and experience. Putting that theory into practice has been an interesting experiment. I'm starting to try to link these many events together so I guess I'll cover them in several entries:

Temple and Family History Work
My current calling in my ward is Family History Consultant, which means I am called to help people do their family history and temple work. It is a challenge because of my natural shyness to try to reach out to people to convince them to let me come over and help them do something they are already feeling reluctant and guilty about. However, I am excited about this calling. I have been working on my own family tree as well as doing Family Search Indexing. Family Search Indexing is the process of viewing an old document and typing the information into a form that makes the document searchable. What I find is that each person becomes so real to me as I type their information. It drives home to me how much our Heavenly Father loves each individual person. For example, I typed in a death certificate of an unidentified military airman who died when his plane crashed in LA during WW2. I wondered if his family ever found out what happened to him in this accident. But the Lord knows who this man was and has a plan for him. In Alma 40: 10, Alma states, "God knoweth all the times which are appointed unto man."

Family history and temple work gives you a whole new sensitivity to the joy and love God has for each of his children. I find myself grateful for a sense of wonder that I experience when I walk down the street and see each individual person as a beloved child of God-- my own sister or brother. And mind you, I am walking down the street at the Gateway mall where the people have some serious issues. In one course down the mall you can see several homeless people, folks who have tanned, colored, surgically altered, and fashioned themselves to the point of being unrecognizable, as well as the gothic gender-benders with multiple tattoos. Yet, I echo Louis Armstrong and "think to myself, 'What a wonderful world.'" (Okay, I have a running soundtrack in my mind sometimes, especially when walking down the street.)

Another thing about family history work is it allows me to see a life in its whole context from beginning to end, and to a degree, in its eternal perspective. When I learn about an ancestor, it is wonderful to learn about how they became the people they were, how they overcame obstacles, and one thing that always stands out to me is that they take nothing with them but who they become. Ultimately all the temporal things that they have worked for fall away and become not meaningless, but history. So the value of temporal pursuits really gets placed in a different perspective. Temporal pursuits create value in the way that they force you to serve, to grow, to learn. Realizing that the word temporal is an adjective meaning related to time, and reflecting back on Alma 40 (verse 8), "all is as one day with God, and time only is measured unto men."

I find myself changing my thinking (perhaps this is due to reaching a more mature phase of life- I am after all hitting middle age full-stride) and making more measured decisions about the things I choose to do and say and think with this new, more spiritually-influenced perspective.

Cracking (up) the DNA

I've noticed that there are more things that are passed down through the DNA that one would not normally think of. I don't think there are any Nobel prizes to be found in studying the genes responsible for these things, but they are interesting to me.

Barefeet---
This one is manifested in three generations of my family (that I know about). My Dad, myself, and my son Joe are all barefooted as often as possible. I personally have been known to leave shoes all over my house, and am currently under penalty if I fail to put them away. All three of us kick our shoes off the instant we walk in the house, and could go literally for days without wearing them if given the opportunity.

Sense of direction---

It's amazing that my pioneer ancestors made it West. They must have been following someone who knew the way, and not only that, they never had to make any right turns or leave at a certain time. I struggled my whole childhood with being unable to tell time on a clock, to tell left and right, and to remember how to set a table. As an adult, I finally was able to master these skills, but it is still a challenge. I know most people can intuitively tell left and right, but I still have to take a moment to think about it. I chuckled when the subject came up at a family gathering and I found out that several of my female cousins suffer from the same quirk! Not only that, those who did not grow up in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains also had trouble with directions (N, S, E, W).

Sense of humor--

Speaking of the pioneer ancestors, I love learning stories about my forebears. However, I am tickled the most when I hear details that reveal my forebears' sense of humor. I got a kick out of reading a sketch of a pioneer family arriving in Utah and being sent to settle in Lindon, Utah. They had sold all their worldly goods, traveled for months through many trials, and finally arrived at the place the prophet had called them to establish Zion. The night they arrived, they camped out near the main road, not knowing that this property belonged to what would be their new neighbor. Upon waking, they found the rancher stopped nearby waiting to chew them out for camping on his land. One of the sons remarked saracastically, "So, this is Zion."

I am constantly trying to keep my sarcastic comments to myself, but it is a challenge when such wit and humor are charging through my veins on an hourly basis. It makes me giggle to see it expressed in my kids, like when Henry laughs and refuses to say Daddy, even though Marty wants nothing more in the world.

Marty

A few weeks ago was the 19th anniversary of my first date with my husband- May 28, 1989. So that means we have officially past the point where I have known him longer than my whole life before we met. He has really worked hard to become the person, the father, the husband, and the son that he wants to be. He works constantly both at his job and at home and just does what needs to be done. He was gone all week last week, and I missed him. While he was gone, I walked around my house and yard and looked at how every surface has his touch on it. He has painted it, mowed it, repaired it, tilled it, cleaned it, and maybe once in a while left a fingerprint or two. Of course he has a few flaws, but they are overwhelmingly outweighed by his generous heart, loyalty, and supportiveness. He is my best friend and the first person I want to see in the morning and the last person I want to see at night. We have been together basically all the time for 19 years now, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

Henry William Lorenzo

Okay all you readers it's time for me to confess something. My husband thinks we named the baby Henry William after his father, Willem Henrikes. Here is the truth:

What he does not know is that in my mind the baby is named Henry after my favorite character in Shakespeare's Plays, King Henry (Henry the 5th), who is the main character in Henry IV, parts 1 and 2, and Henry V. I find the image of the (now) righteous warrior king to be so powerful as Henry leads his subjects into battle against the French, and then binds up the wounds by making a love match with the princess Catherine.

This speech is my favorite: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechhenryV.html

Of course William is after The bard himself. Forget that William is Marty's middle name, or his Dad's (Willem), or his grandfather, or my great-grandfather. Okay maybe those things were influential, but not THAT influential. Don't you know that Henry is going to be a brilliant writer himself and bring the literary world to its knees, not to mention sell millions of books and buy his mother a castle in Scotland next door to JK Rowling? (Maybe MacBeth's is available?) Then I can spend my days wandering the Heath, looking for eye of newt. Never mind that right now the only word he seems to know is "NIIIIIYE!!!!" (Which originally meant Caroline, but now seems to be an all-purpose word meaning, "I'm here, pay attention to me!") Don't you know that Henry's 17th great-grandfather was Geoffrey Chaucer, the Father of English Literature (this is the problem with studying Family History, you get a rather inflated sense of your destiny by knowing that you have such potential within your genes).

When we were in London, visiting the new Globe Theater was really a highlight of the trip for me.

Lorenzo I was able to throw in there after learning about my great-great grandfather Albert Lorenzo Cullimore. I fell in love with him a little bit (in a granddaughterly way of course) reading about his life, and I needed to throw in a little something from my family, since we were after all naming the baby after his father's father!

I think I developed my love of Shakespeare as a child doing backyard Shakespeare three separate summers. Never mind that I played male characters the first two years, at least I had a good role the second year. In my final year I got a plum role as Gertrude, the queen in Hamlet (Hamlet's mother). I can still remember the brocade ribbon on my costume and having my sister french braid my hair for me, since I could never do it well myself. I can remember the feeling of standing on the stage/back porch in the hot summer evening. I think that was a prime moment in my life.

So Henry, my beloved son, as you turn one this weekend, remember that you will grow up to be kind, righteous, and brave like King Henry, and witty and clever like the Bard, and generous and faithful like grandpa Albert.

Cricket

Cricket is my darling daughter. She is such a fun daughter-- so kind and sensitive. Her teacher sent home a report card this week that says she's brilliant in every way except that she needs to learn to stay out of things that don't concern her. I find this so interesting because I have also had parents come up to me and tell me how she has stood up for their child and defended them against bullies or other threats. I think these are two sides of the same coin.

She does need to learn to navigate that a little better, but I think we all do. I had another mom warn me that Cricket is a little naive when it comes to the queen-bee drama that goes on at her age, and she was very concerned about Cricket being the target of this at a recent sleepover party. I was a nervous wreck because it was really her first sleepover with someone who wasn't a first cousin. However, it seemed to go smoothly. Her daddy and I made a deal that she doesn't do any more sleepovers when Momma doesn't feel good about it!

She is growing up so fast.

Baby Love

Baby Love
Originally uploaded by FishChick

This is my little one Henk, who is just about the sweetest most happy baby that I ever saw. Who wouldn't want to spend every day with such a sweetie? He has this power over me and has since he was born and would look up at me so aware and perfect with his mouth in a little O.